Byte Bullies at the Ballot
During Kenya's 2022 general election, feminist researchers found that women running for office were targeted with online abuse far more often than men. Sexual harassment, body-shaming and gendered disinformation, they concluded, were being used to push women out of public life.
When Kenyans went to the polls in August 2022, the contest played out as much on Facebook and Twitter as on the campaign trail. For many women candidates, researchers found, the online arena was hostile in ways their male rivals rarely experienced.
Pollicy, a Kampala-based feminist research organization, tracked and analyzed the accounts of more than 250 women and men running for office on Twitter, now X, and Facebook during the campaign and voting period. Its findings were published in a report titled “Byte Bullies.” The study combined data scraped from public profiles with focus groups and machine-learning models trained to detect abuse in English and Swahili.
A gendered gap in the abuse
The disparity the researchers measured was stark. According to the report, 55.7 percent of Facebook accounts belonging to women candidates received some form of online violence, compared with 35.4 percent of accounts belonging to men, Global Voices reported. Two out of five women candidates experienced sexual harassment on their X accounts during the election.
The abuse took several forms, the study found, including sexual harassment, hate speech, trolling, body-shaming and disinformation. Analysis of sexual comments, Pollicy wrote, revealed “underlying themes of comments attacking women’s appearance with words like ‘old’ and ‘ass,’” alongside language meant to discourage them from running, according to Global Voices.
Attacks aimed below the neck
Prominent candidates drew concentrated fire. Martha Karua, the 66-year-old running for deputy president, was targeted over her age, with trolls profiling her as a grandmother who should stay home and care for her grandchildren rather than pursue politics, Global Voices reported. Anne Waiguru, who was running for governor of Kirinyaga County, was among the women heavily targeted with sexual comments.
Such tactics are a recurring feature of Kenyan campaigns, researchers say. A peer-reviewed study of the 2017 and 2022 elections, published in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, found that women were routinely dismissed as “slay queens” or socialites to imply they had advanced through relationships rather than merit, and that attacks focused on their personal lives and bodies rather than their policies.
Driven offline
The consequences reached beyond the screen. Of 29 candidates interviewed by Pollicy, seven said they avoided social media during their campaigns because of the harassment, and one lost a parliamentary race after intimate images circulated on Facebook and WhatsApp groups, Global Voices reported.
Legal recourse was rare. “Women often don’t sue because they don’t actually know that the law can protect them. Also, because of the stigma around it,” Reginalda Obara, an advocate of the High Court of Kenya, told Global Voices. Researchers and digital-rights advocates argue that the pattern amounts to a barrier to women’s political participation, one that platforms and regulators have been slow to address.